Stanfords Blog

AmazingWorld Children’s Maps

The latest addition to our map department are these seven new AmazingWorld children’s A2 wall maps.

These lovingly crafted maps introduce little ones to the many wonders awaiting them around the world. Spark up conversations and fuel their curiosity to guide them as they discover more about the animals, foods, people, places, cultures, and plants across the globe.

Build their knowledge and develop an understanding of the similarities and differences that connect them to people & places around the world.

Happy 90th Birthday Dervla Murphy

The award winning travel writer Dervla Murphy turns 90 on Sunday 28th November. Stanfords wishes her a very happy birthday.

Irish Examiner News Picture 01-10-2011 Saturday Social Page. Travel writer Dervla Murphy at her home in Lismore, Co Waterford. Picture: Dan Linehan

Dervla Murphy has won worldwide praise for her writing and has been described as a ‘travel legend’ and ‘the First Lady of Irish cycling’. In March she joined Bill Bryson, Michael Palin, Jan Morris, Colin Thubron and Paul Theroux and became a recipient of the Edward Stanford Award for Outstanding Contribution to Travel Writing.

Atlas of Forgotten Places

Travis Elborough, winner of the 2020 Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards Illustrated Book of the Year, is back with another book in the Unexpected Atlas series.

Atlas of Forgotten Places takes us to the places that time forgot. Abandoned, mysterious, sleeping monuments around the world have been relegated to the margins of history, pushed off the map and out of sight.

From ancient ruins and crumbling castles to more recent relics – an art deco New York subway station, a Soviet ghost town in the Arctic Circle, a flooded Thai mall teeming with aquatic life.

Original maps and stunning colour photography accompany Travis Elborough’s moving historic and geographic accounts of each site. The featured locations are a stark reminder of what was, and the accounts in this investigative book help to bring their stories back to life, telling us what happened, when and why, and to whom.

Here Travis Elborough introduces Atlas of Forgotten Places:

Gift Guide: Fun with Flags

As well as stocking maps, guides and books about different countries, we also have a wide selection of flags in different sizes. If you are looking for the flag of a particular country, please get in touch.

If you are in search of some fun with flags, here are some great gifts for vexophiles:

Routemasters of the Universe By Harry Rosehill

The last Routemaster to ply a proper London bus route retired in 2005. But over 15 years later, this indestructible bus still pops up everywhere. It’s just that nowadays merely in London Routemasters are wedding buses, Ghost Buses, afternoon tea buses, mobile yoghurt stalls on the South Bank… And elsewhere, all over the world, they have found new homes and been put to the most unlikely but serendipitous uses.

In Routemasters of the Universe Harry Rosehill catalogues all the possible uses of a Routemaster bus, from a tea room in Essex to a posh B&B in County Durham, a promotional bus for a theatre company in Moscow to an office in Bermuda, not to mention making history during the Iraq War as a Human Shield in Baghdad. Along the way he explains how Routemasters were built to last so long, why they’ve become so cherished, and where you get a spare big end for a 70-year-old commercial vehicle.

Here Harry Rosehill explains how he, a proud bus nerd, came to write this alternative history of a true London icon:

An extract from Allegorizings by Jan Morris

The Stanfords November Book of the Month is Allegorizings by Jan Morris. Published one year on from her death, at the age of ninety-four, it is the final despatch from one of the greatest chroniclers of the Twentieth Century. To give you a taste, here is an extract from Allegorizings:

Paradise Somewhere

If paradise is the stuff of the conventional promise, all sweetmeats and complaisant houris, then I certainly have never experienced it. But a nirvana of a different kind I did transiently enter long ago, when I was on my way back to Kathmandu, in Nepal, out of the Himalayas. I was travelling with a Sherpa friend of mine. His name was Sonam. We had come out of the mountains fast, and when we got down into the foothills I began to feel ill and weak – the reverse of altitude sickness, I suppose. The monsoon had broken upon us, and the endless rain did not help, but ‘Come with me to my home village,’ Sonam said, ‘and we will make you better.’

A Walk in the Wild, a Bed in the Bush

By Denis Costello, co-author of Walking Safaris of South Africa

Wandering in the tracks of African megafauna in deep wilderness is the essence of the walking safari experience and in the safe hands of knowledgeable professional guides, it’s never less than a fascinating adventure. Thanks to its size and variety of biomes, South Africa is prime walking safari territory. With so many options, the secret to finding the right one for you is to think less about the walking and more about the sleeping arrangements. Here’s five styles to consider, from camping mat to luxury sleep-out.

Fifty Words for Snow by Nancy Campbell

Fifty Words for Snow is a journey to discover snow in cultures around the world through different languages. The climate is a prism through which to view the human world – just as language can be. It is possible to see back into the distant past and trace the historical movement of people through a single unit of meaning: in Europe, for example, many words (snow, snee, nieve, etc.) stem from the same root, the ancient Latin nix and Greek nipha – the initial s comes and goes, without concealing the close connection.

Children’s Book of the Month

Stanfords Children’s Book of the Month for November 2021 is The Trans-Siberian Railway Illustrated by Anna Desnitskaya, Text by Aleksandra Litvina.

A gloriously illustrated journey through Russia along the length of the Trans- Siberian railway.

Book of the Month: Allegorizings by Jan Morris

Stanfords Book of the Month for November 2021 is Allegorizings by Jan Morris.

Published one year on from her death, at the age of ninety-four, Jan Morris’ Allegorizings is the final despatch from one of the greatest chroniclers of the Twentieth Century.

‘Almost nothing in life is only what it seems.’